7th April, 2018
What would you think of Bitcoin if you could live off just 1 bitcoin for a whole year?
The issue of financial inclusion and removing the arbitrary barriers preventing many of the world's poorest people to participate in the global economy is a hot topic. The entire premise of globalisation was to spread the miracle of capitalism around the world to reduce poverty and improve economic inclusion. Seems that it just spread the pain of poverty around more, while pushing wealth toward the wealthiest.
1 bitcoin were the equivalent of a comfortable yearly wage.
But I know we are still a long way from that,
or are we?
Bitcoin has gone from being an obscure distributed computer experiment, into a fully fledged hybrid decentralised currency who´s brand recognition has become the new financial zeitgeist.
Not even a short 10 years ago, Bitcoin was only some computer code running on a hand full of computers owned by a few libertarian geeks interested in cryptography, creating some obscure arcane digital tokens that none of these pioneers ever imagined would be worth anything at all.
Now, the world is slowly waking up the fact that these token hold the promise of a new paradigm of wealth, trust and data management on the internet.
As a thought experiment I'd like to compare what the value of one bitcoin is today against the average person's wage is in different countries around the world.1
At the time of writing, BTC stands at about US$6800. The average person living in countries including: Thailand, Peru, Algeria, Indonesia, Morocco and India all get by off less than 1btc a year.
In fact , if we line up all the countries in order of yearly wage from lowest to highest, then the people in the lowest 114 countries live on less than 1btc per year, some could have a luxurious life with this wealth.
That is about 57% of the world (by country) is able to live on less than 1btc per year.(1)
(2)Back in mid dec 2017 the price of bitcoin hit close to 20,000usd. At that point, over 75% of the world was living on less than 1btc per year. These countries included: China, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, Greece, Portugal and Saudi Arabia.
In fact the mean annual wage of countries is only US$10,133.
As we look at the inevitable reversal of the latest correction to the price of #bitcoin, most believe that the all time high price of about US$20k will be surpassed, then more and more of the world's people could live a comfortable, even luxurious life on 1btc a year!
A note on the data:
- I wanted to get median wage levels but no data set I could find would include all countries. This data set is the closest reputable data I could find that reflects wages.
- the vertical axis of the chart is logarithmic.
- The list of countries also includes territories, that is why the total count is actually higher than may be expected (217 vs 195)
- 1 This data is take from the following sites. The entire list is on this page from wikipedia it is the 3rd dataset on this page (united nations 2016 dataset), and its souces is found here
